Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Now, this is a common problem for all who is using shared Exchange 2010 mailboxes with Outlook 2010, and possible other combinations as well.

The problem is that if you are given access to a shared mailbox, whenever there is a new email, you don't get the same notification when a new email arrives, as you do in your primary email account in Outlook.

According to Microsoft, this is by design. And there is no way to control it, even if you add special rules to Outlook to display email alerts, it simply does not show up on incoming email.

Here is a possible solution for this. Be aware that this is maybe not suitable for your environment, but it works though.

The standard way (and officially supported):
The Exchange admin has to give you full mailbox access to the shared mailbox with EMC or powershell commands. In Exchange 2010 SP2, there is an auto-mapping feature, that automatically adds the shared mailbox to Outlook when you start Outlook. So no longer need for the end user to manually add the mailbox, as before.
Great, only problem is that you never will never receive email alerts or notification when a new email arrives in the shared mailbox.

The other way (and not officially supported):

Instead of giving the end-user full access in Exchange ECM or powershell, give the user the account information (email address+username) and password for the shared mailbox. In Outlook 2010, go to File -> Account settings and click New.. to create a new Exchange account. In Outlook 2007 it was not supported to have more than one Exchange account, but in Outlook 2010 this is supported. It should take only a few seconds and then then new shared mailbox is ready. Restart Outlook. First time the user logs in, the user will asked to enter credentials for the shared mailbox. Enter it in the form DOMAIN\username + password. After that the user will not be asked for credentials again. That is, if you set the account for the shared mailbox to "Password never expires" in AD. If you don't set that property, the user will be asked again for credential after some time each time Outlook is started.

As you see in my example, I have added 2 extra shared mailboxes and they show up as separate Exchange accounts.

But security, hello?
First of all, this is a little dirty trick in order to get the email notification. At first you might think its a bad idea to give the password for the shared mailbox for several users in your AD. Not really if you ask me, they will have full access to the mailbox anyway if you give them "Full Access" permission in Exchange. Secondly, if you restrict the account to deny login to workstations and servers, then there is no simple way to exploit the account. If you also put "Password never expires" and "User cannot change password", there is no way the users can change the password and they also will not get prompted for the password again. If you are a little paranoid, you can enter the password yourself for the user first time after the account is added to Outlook, so the users will never know the password.